maybe necause the fired immediately most of their sales staff and is thinking about taking the chance for reducing the amount of their shops ?
first, they stopped all of the contracts with all the little, but very competent venders and repairing enterprises, minimized their margins already in the years before,
second, they opened their own shops all around the world,
at the same time started the sales by internet..
now, the market is absolutely in their hand - I think 99% of their hatdware sales and 100% of the more and more important sales of entertaining products like music, Videos, etc. are done by internet... why still need for all the shops?
just a handful of "apple churches" in each country will be enough to pretend that the have still contact with their believers of the "apple church"...
shares always win when the enterprises fire thousands of employees or outsource their production for example to china, where "employees" are more or less slaves and nobody controls environment pollution...
it is all about money...
maybe, apple invested some billion of their 500 billion USD of cash to buy their own stocks... they did this already often enough ... and stabilizes their stocks...